In the book, he did.
As threatened:
Best Stephen King TV / Movie Adaptation? (Poll)
I know it’s for the tension and drama, but jeez – you have to cross a railroad bridge and you don’t know when the next train is coming, so you just take your good ol’ time getting across? Man, I’d be getting across that bridge as fast as I could! (And why was the fat kid crawling? Did he think he was going to fall through?)
Going by my memory of that age, yes! Forget logic, forget that even I, a much skinnier kid, wouldn’t fit through the ties. You think you will! It isn’t like you are going to run a test. “Aw gee! he DID fit [splash] through!”
The other two are Apt Pupil about a teenager who discovers his neighbor is an actual Nazi, and The Breathing Method. The former has had a decent adaptation (which personally I think owes much to Ian McKellen’s performance). The latter remains in development hell and frankly doesn’t really have enough of a plot to make it worthwhile.
“I never had any friends later on like the ones I did when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” – Gordie Lachance.
I think the stories are a bit more relatable to a lot of people. For Stand by Me, as a child of the 80s, my childhood activities were not radically different from what we see in the movie. Okay, so I didn’t carry a .45 or look for any corpses, but me and my pals went traipsing through the woods, roaming far from home in places we probably shouldn’t have been? I didn’t know it when I was a kid, but when I saw the movie I was around the same age as the character (that part I knew), and for a lot of us it’s a period of time where we’re moving on to a new chapter in our lives. We’re leaving childhood behind and, well, not quite becoming adults, but we’re a bit farther along than we were. That’s something most of us experience.
True, I get the relatablity of ‘Stand By Me’. I spent plenty of time at that age traipsing around in the woods and general places I shouldn’t have been, too.
But relatability doesn’t really explain why ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ is so beloved. “Ah, reminds me of when I was framed for the murder of my spouse, sentenced to life in prison, exposed the crimes of the corrupt warden, causing him to kill himself, and then escaped to Mexico to live out the remainder of my life. Good times!” 
Another favorite adaptation. Excellent cast and good story line.
Have you ever walked across a railroad trestle? We used to do it on occasion when I was a kid, and it was always nerve-racking. You never knew if a train was going to come, and you can see through the trestle to the drop below and know that if you had to jump, the fall would likely kill you. I still can’t believe I ever did it. My quarrel with the kid crawling across scene is that his knees would give out almost immediately and be bleeding profusely after only a few feet. He didn’t even have a scrape.
‘The Shawshank Redemption’ just happens to be an all-time great movie. It is known for being a great movie, not a Stephen King movie. That is just some fun trivia in its case.
Also, The Shawshank Redemption wasn’t very successful at the box office but was more popular as a home video rental and on cable.
Do you remember The Wrestler (2008) starring Micky Rourke as an aging professional wrestler in the vein of Hulk Hogan? This wrestler, Randy the Ram, whose heyday was back in the 80s, they even show an NES game he was in, continues to perform to ever diminishing crowds despite the physical and mental toll it takes on him. He doesn’t wrestle for the money, he’s simply addicted to the fame and the crowd’s adoration.
I was listening to NPR and they had a caller who wanted to talk about the movie. He was an aging pastor whose congration was growing smaller and smaller as they continued to die and younger people weren’t joining. This pastor said how much he was like Randy. No matter how small his congregation got or how old he was, as long as people kept showing up he’d keep on preaching.
What I’m getting at is you don’t have to be a wrestler or even an athlete to relate to Randy the Ram. The themes of growing older and changing is why Stand by Me resonated with audiences so well. For Shawshank, despite never being imprisoned, we can relate to Dufresne. We’ve had bosses who were jerks, we’ve worked hard at one point or another without being rewarded, or we’ve gone through hard times where we ran on little more than hope & prayers. We see ourselves in Dufresne, not because we murdered our wife and lover, but we’ve all felt trapped and yearning to be free was what kept us going.
Yeah, very well said, and I agree. I was just having a bit of fun.
I like Stand By Me, but am not hugely into it. Even though I grew up in a small village, where my friends and I would hang out and get bored and wander around aimlessly, in a very similar way to the movie, there’s something about the American-ness and 50s setting that separated me from really connecting to it. I was more into The Goonies, somehow that frenetic chaos and the fantasy adventure appealed to me.